Groq has raised $650 million in new growth capital, a financing round meant to push the company deeper into hosted AI inference after its unusual Nvidia deal last year.

The round was led by Disruptive and Infinitum, with participation from investors that chose to reinvest. Groq said the money will accelerate expansion of its global inference cloud and help it scale toward 200 megawatts of capacity by the end of 2027.

The company says it now operates 13 data centers across North America, Europe, the Middle East, and APAC. It also says its platform serves more than five million developers and thousands of AI-native companies, processing trillions of tokens each week.

That positioning matters because Groq is no longer telling a simple chip-startup story. In December 2025, the company entered a non-exclusive licensing agreement with Nvidia, and Nvidia later announced an LPX platform that incorporates Groq's inference technology. TechCrunch reported that founder Jonathan Ross, president Sunny Madra, and other employees moved to Nvidia as part of that transaction.

Groq is now trying to make the remaining company a specialized cloud operator for inference workloads. It also announced leadership additions including Alan Rice as COO, Sinclair Schuller as CTO, and Rakesh Malhotra as CPO.

The open question is whether Groq can turn demand for low-latency inference into durable cloud revenue while Nvidia and other infrastructure providers move into the same market. The financing gives it more time and capacity to test that bet.